Military spending is good, but overspending is not. The Democrats overspend on social programs, the Republicans overspend on military programs. That is why we are trillions in debt. Spending is good, but overspending is not good.

While investing in infrastructure is a noble need for all citizen, the issue is the same political leaders get to decide which infrastructures get money. Even worse, they write rules into the spending bills so that only well connected cronies win the contracts. Politicians do not block the spending of our tax dollars, they just quible over which campaign donor wins the contracts. So how does wasting money on crony capitalistic infrastructure help citizens? Unless you happen to be one of ten people that has to cross a billion dollar bridge. I do not disagree with the need for this spending, I just do not think current political leaders are smart enough (or morally benevolent) to use the money for the citizens. They are all crooks!

Seems this is the same point we are making for military spending, it is bloated and inefficient. We love our military and cost be damned (so to speak).

Part of the problem is the use of the military for missions it should not be doing. You don't need heavy armor to fight and win a dynamic battle, but you do need it to act as an expeditionary police force. Speed and agility factor into survivability as much as armor.

The military should be a lean, mean fighting machine. You call them when you want to kill people and break things. They should not be patrolling streets enforcing law and order. That makes them a target; slowing moving through the streets or standing at checkpoints. Fighting a static war is the worst possible situation for any military.

The 'low-intensity' conflicts that we have engaged in since WWII are not a good use of our resources. If an objective is that important to our national interests, ratchet up the intensity and do it right. Kill the enemy until they surrender or cease to exist. War is a dirty business, attempts to clean it up or reduce the mess only cost more lives. If you are going to get dirty, just get in there, do it, and get it done.

Defense procurement will never get stopped completely. Every stable nation must have a credible military to survive. This is an immutable fact.

Right now we have real cuts to the defense budget. As things slow down and programs start to get cancelled, the manufacturing base shrinks. That is not necessarily a bad thing, in fact it needs to happen to get the federal government under control; but it must be done thoughtfully. The cost of reopening closed production lines and expanding the base when defense inevitably ramps back up could well exceed the short term savings of closures.

An economist might have optimism, relying on the old 'guns and butter' analogy. But manufacturing plants don't just switch over from making 'guns' to making 'butter'. There are already many people out of work and there will be many more with a lot less money to spent on 'butter'.

What is really needed is a stable, long term budget for the federal government. Politicians love the lack of budget and constant shuffle of money because they can manipulate the flow for their (or their supporter's) benefit. A strict budget would add stability and give an opportunity for better planning not only to the defense sector, but to federal contractors as a whole.

I agree with you in theory, but in practice I have witnessed billions go toward studies and design efforts that never went anywhere or benefited anyone.

There are many reasons for the high price of defense articles. Rigid specifications, reliability, redundancy are a few of the good reasons. But there are bad ones as well such as unrealistic requirements, unrealistic schedules, and an acquisition system that nearly all defense insiders agree is horribly broken.

When the military asks that you give them a capability that has never existed in the history of mankind, based on the theoretical conjecture of some think tank, and is willing to pay hundreds of millions to you for the effort; of course you take up the challenge. But as we have seen with things like the Army's FCS program, the money gets spent and nothing gets produced.

It is not all the military's fault; ultimately Congress has to approve the project. Back in the 90's people came to realize that Congress would not give very much money to S&T (Science and Technology) programs to do research. Research doesn't always give you a tangible benefit in a defined timeframe the way acquisition does. Many programs began to sell Congress on 'leap-ahead' technologies. The theory was to go ahead and do the design for a new product with the prediction that research on the enabling technology would have a breakthrough in time for the manufacturing stage of the program.

Basically, this enabled the services to spend the big acquisition money on directed research instead of begging for the scraps that a research effort would normally get.

Rob, while all economic theory is debateable, there is increasing evidence that WWII spending is not responsible for ending the Great Depression. Google WWII and depression for both scholarly articles and popular press (Forbes) articles on this topic. We tend to overlook that during the course of the war while all that production was underway the US population was deprived of the usual benefits of it, and only benefitted at the conclusion of the war when the US was the only country left standing.

As other have pointed out, using tax dollars can a stimulus to growth, but if you want to go that way I think you would be beter off investing it in US infrastructure (research, highways and bridges, etc.) where the effort benefits the citizens. Our current political leaders don't seem to want to go that way, however.

On the functional side, I have yet to hear a good argument that our military is dangerously unprepared to defend the country, as we outspend any other country by very high multiples. A greater danger appears to be that if you have a highly capable but underutilized military, you find reasons to use it.

I do not disagree with your sentiment, but military spending is one of well defined mandates of the US constitution. The other functions of our government "safety" nets have to be "defined" by some interpretation of the "welfare clause". So if you are worried about our tax dollars, I would focus on the major spending items. How many jobs does the government "create" (unless it is a direct buearacrat that adds cost to overall goverment)? What the government is good at is dictating regulations that force private companies to hire people to ensure compliance.

Then again, all military spending comes out of your tax dollars, which you could alternately spend on swimming pools, new cars and personal electronics. Admittedly, a lot of this stuff is manufactured in China.

There are all sorts of studies that claim that military spending is the least efficient form of job creation on a dollars per job basis.

The USA, in the absense of an all-out arms race, has spent billions of dollars on stealth fighters, and has not done a particularly good job of providing armour to protects its troops in Afghanistan from IEDs and such. I don't know which project would create more jobs.

The purpose of military spending should be to make the military more effective. I think job creation is a dangerous and unneccessary distraction.

A few weeks ago, Ford Motor Co. quietly announced that it was rolling out a new wrinkle to the powerful safety feature called stability control, adding even more lifesaving potential to a technology that has already been very successful.

It won't be too much longer and hardware design, as we used to know it, will be remembered alongside the slide rule and the Karnaugh map. You will need to move beyond those familiar bits and bytes into the new world of software centric design.

People who want to take advantage of solar energy in their homes no longer need to install a bolt-on solar-panel system atop their houses -- they can integrate solar-energy-harvesting shingles directing into an existing or new roof instead.

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